Twenty-five taxpayer-funded groups that should lose their welfare cheques

By Matt Sinclair of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

Yesterday, LeftWatch followed up
on its attack on the taxpayer-funded Family and Parenting Institute's
intervention in the political debate over whether marriage should be
recognised in the tax system. Ed West, at the Telegraph, has argued
that taxpayer funded campaigning 'charities' should have their funding
cut. The new blog asked "What other taxpayer funded charities should
lose their welfare cheques?"

Happily, I can report that we've produced a detailed report on this issue at the TaxPayers' Alliance, Taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning
(PDF), which contains a nice big list of taxpayer funded campaigns to
cut. That report argued that, as well as introducing a law emulating
the American restriction on the use of taxpayers' money to hire
lobbyists, the Conservatives should cut funding from the following
groups, which are primarily political campaigns or pressure groups:

Trade associations

The Local Government Association - £14.8 million

The NHS Confederation - £7.0 million

The Association of Police Authorities - £1.4 million

(These groups do some actual work for the public sector
so the figures above are only the membership subscription fees from
public sector organisations paying for representation).

Campaigns for health policy and lifestyle changes

Alcohol Concern - £515,000

Sustain - £380,508

National Heart Forum - £315,000

Action on Smoking and Health - £191,000

Living Streets - £150,000

Family Planning Association (fpa) - £130,000

Alliance House Foundation and the Institute for Alcohol Studies - £76,236

Consensus Action on Salt and Health - £23,500

Environmental campaigns

The Sustainable Development Commission - £4.1 million

The Forum for the Future - £1.6 million

The Campaign for Better Transport (Transport 2000) - £417,210

The Climate Group - £186,523

Friends of the Earth - £153,994

The Green Alliance - £137,120

UK Public Health Association - £84,090

People and Planet - £73,833

Women's Environmental Network - £25,725

The Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences - £3,500

Think tanks

New Economics Foundation - £601,518

Demos - £553,004

The Institute for Public Policy Research - £350,330

The New Local Government Network - £117,972

There you go, a list of twenty-five groups to get the
next Government started. There is more detail on all of them in the
report, including details of how they spent our money.

We'll
need to be avoid any accusation of ideological bias though, and
while none of our FOIs for the report came back with funding to
centre-right groups, it was worrying to see a number of joint fringe
meetings organised by centre right think-tanks and taxpayer funded
groups in Manchester this year (such joint meetings at party
conferences often come with substantial funding attached). No doubt
we'll find out more about that when we repeat this exercise next year.

Taxpayer
funded lobbying and political campaigning is undemocratic and distorts
decision making in deeply pernicious ways, as we set out in our report.
There is a lot of it going on and, with the public finances tight, it
should clearly be cut.